Saw the other texture post and decided to look up some stuff I've done. Most of my stuff is hand drawn but I'll use images from imageafter for color layers, reference or for details like on one I cut out some screws. This image is an exception where I used a chunk of the photo as the layer then made it seamless and added details.

This is one I did later, where I created basic wood and then used bits and pieces from imageafter images (sorry, no longer know which) to cut out knots, cuts and generally add more detail. This was done fairly quickly as a result as those little details can take a long time so photosourcing is a huge help.

That´s some nice stuff. I like the wood crate best I must say, and I believe it took hours. Very nice.
The others are nice too, just a little too much photograph in there still. But that´s just my taste and it depends on the other textures around it. If all the textures in a level are of the same "style" that´ll work just as fine..
The metal tiles are nice, but they could be a tad sharper.
The door´s a nice blend of photo/handdrawn style.

Thanks. The wood crate did take hours and I saved the planks to reuse. The metal ceiling tiles for the Skalos textures were photosourced but the matching wall textures were 100% hand drawn. I used the eye dropper on the roof texture to extract matching colors and built the metal texture -it isn't quite the same as the photo if you look close because the photo actually has much more colors in that range. I zoomed in to pixel level and the gradient changes from the photo from any small clump of pixels were much more complex than I could manage.

I went a little wacky at one time reading stuff like some cool material by Dr. John Russ http://www.drjohnruss.com/ and other material on perception, edge detection and all that, to understand how we see things but the amount of time spent to try to get a texture almost perfectly photoreal by hand becomes not worth it when you can just use a photo.

I was just searching turbosquid for a skin texture and found a good one and free as well! Then i read the author name and though "mmh that sound familiar" and lo and behold a google search showed this forum on top